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‘Live, local, and late breaking’

In chapter 10, Graber discussed the emerging trends of coverage of state and local affairs. She discusses how more and more small towns are scaling back on the number of local newspapers. The current economy isn’t helping matters as newspapers are forced to lay off members of their staff to meet budget demands and stay afloat. Because of this, market size is growing. Communities that were uniquely served, now share their news space and time with other surrounding areas.

Graber highlights the umbrella competition pattern in which smaller units operate within a larger system. The first layer consists of large metropolitan dailies that provide coverage on international, national and regional coverage. The second layer is comprised of smaller satelite dailies that carry more local news than the larger papers do. The third layer contains suburban dailies which emphasize local, nonpolitical news. These are attractive to advertisers because they offer more opportunities for businesses to get their names out there. The fourth layer consists of weekly newspapers and shoppers that are free because they are mostly advertisements with a sprinkling of content to supplement the products/services featured.

To this Graber adds a 5th element: the alternative press, which covers ethnic, racial, linguistic and religious groups as well as those with “unorthodox lifestyles,” such as gays and lesbians. These publications meet the underserved needs of these minority groups and provides them with a sense of collectiveness. Graber believes these groups are a growing force to be reckoned with in the U.S. population.

Phyllis Kaniss identified six media styles that are especially common of public figures at the subnational level. The paranoid media-avoider fears the press and actively avoids contact with it as much as possible. Information-hungry journalists are likely to retailiate with unfavorable publicity at every opportunity. The naive professional supplies the media with information without recognizing the fact that journalists have the will to determine how the story will be framed. The ribbon cutter is a “media junkie” concerned with arranging trivial events regularly. The dancing marionettes take cues from media editorials and follow how they believe the media wants them to act. This will result often in favorable coverage but leads to an image that the politician is a puppet of the journalist. Colorful quotables look for attractive sound bites to make mundane stories seem more appealing to reporters. Then there are outright liars who conceal, slant or otherwise distort information to put themselves in the favorable light. Kaniss’s framing of the journalist versus the public figure is curious. There seems to be much focus on the evil politician, without giving any consideration to the journalist who is the perfect angel.

State news is often neglected, and some states receive too much coverage during presidential campaigns relative to their electoral power (cough, cough, Iowa). While this chapter is a critical analysis of how the local news has broadened to encompass the larger perspective, I don’t see this as a bad thing. The fact remains that we Iowans live in the middle of nowhere and are far removed from the global perspective. In order to understand how we contribute to the rest of the world, perhaps we should read more about it.